On 2008-07-02 17:50, Pacifilantic wrote:It was a large (at least 12" tall) conical mountain of shaved/crushed ice... fresh pineapple cubes, speared with toothpicks, covered the volcano's slopes. Apparently dry ice was inside the volcano, producing excellent "smoke" for quite a long time through a hole in the volcano's top.

You can still order this at the Mai-Kai. It's on the dessert menu and called a Polynesian Surprise. But instead of dry ice, it's lit up with sparklers. I think it's lit up from the inside too so the ice "volcano" glows. It's great, although dry ice would be a nice touch!

Mauna Loa Volcano .75c
"fresh chunks of golden pineapple and preserved kumquats set in a tropical ice topped mountain. order for two or more." another menu describes it like this
Mauna Loa Volcano .85c
"Fresh pineapple and preserved kumquats in a tropical ice capped mountain flamed with 151 demerera rum for a dip." (order for two or more) per person.
Trader Syd was the owner. I will try and find time to upload some pictures of the menus. I have an article on the owner somewhere.

Nice stash of paper ephemera, pa'akiki, never seen that many Miami Luau menus in one place! I would love to use that menu with the rendering of the exterior in one of my future books (and that Trader Syd photo with it?). It seems like one can really see the Van DerCar statuary in it.

Unfortunately, the article came up so small that I cannot read it. Does it mention Syd's full name? I am sending you a pm, please check under "personal messages".

Re: the Van DerCar sculptures... I suspect they were not original to the Luau building. In the online photos of the older Luau postcards (date given as 1959), the sculptures don't appear. Does anyone remember when they were added? In my admittedly faulty memory, we returned to the Luau in the early '70's after several years away, and I felt that the place looked and felt really different from the way I remembered it as a smaller child in the late '50's early 60's. Perhaps the sculptures were part of the reason. I'll see if I have any photos. IMO the light concrete fluid-looking Van DerCar art, while cool in its own way, was rather jarring in the dark woods and green foliage of the traditional tiki restaurant setting. Possibly more representative of late 60's psychedelia... which still stays within the theme of "escape", I guess!

...it becomes clear that the Moai statues and the extra palm front porte cochere were added later, while the original entrance hut's roof was changed to glass plates:

It sounds like you favor more "authentic" Tiki style, a la Oceanic Arts. But the giant Easter Island heads with the flame coming out and the Tikis holding the new palm front roof are exactly what I describe and favor as "Tiki Modern": The re-interpretation of Polynesian art with a bohemian beatnik "modern art" slant. Ever since I saw the postcard I have been wanting to see close ups of the statues, because to me they are a fine example of American mid-century modern Tiki art --even if they were made in the 70s: Because their source of inspiration lies in the spirit of mid-century modernism, very much like a lot of WITCO's 70s oeuvre does, too.

In Pa'akiki's menu collection, the menu showing renderings of the Luau's entrance with the Van DerCar-like statuary gives the address as "John F. Kennedy Causeway (79th Street Causeway)". The other menus, and the older postcards, apparently just say "79th Street Causeway". This may help fix the time frame a bit. The road wouldn't have been renamed in honor of JFK until some time after his presidency.

Very good point! This is urban archeology, too: Not only the searching out and finding of the actual places under layers of renovation and modernization, but also the digging up and comparing of paper ephemera and scriptures, zooming into details and deducing facts about their history.

Pa'akiki. Wow thanks for the post, I have never seen that Luau menu with the rendering, it is really cool. It would be great if you could rescan that article on Trader Syd and post it to that we could all read it.

Dang Bigbro, your really good at this historical Tiki research stuff. It's almost as though you do this kind of thing for a living! Keep up the good work.

Duh! I just went back thru my own link to my old thread, and towards the end, among those slightly confusing posts by his friend who runs the Van Dercar blog, I found this (!):

Quote:

On 2005-10-14 07:57, ripaldaz wrote:[Thank you for posting my photo & websites. There will be more photos of Van's paintings & sculpture. I have been in touch with a number of friends from 30 years ago. Some have quite a large collection of Van's work. We had a fun group of friends. The warlock stuff was just a marketing hook.

I have emailed the museum of art miami archive to see if they have a photo of the old Luau Restaurant on Miami Beach. VanDercar sculpted the tiki's that were inside the restaurant.

I swear I did not read this last part until now! So now that we can be certain, let's find Trader Syd or his descendants and see if they have any pics of the statues!

So I picked up a matchbook from the Luau last week, it was cheap and I couldn't remember if I had this one. I think there may have been a couple of designs. Before I put it with our other matchbooks I was looking at it and noticed it said "designed by Franklin Hughes" (I presume that meant the restaurant, not the matchbook).

I did the requisite google searches and did a search here on T.C. but came up empty. Does the name mean anything to anyone? Could more be discovered by you folks in Miami? Did Franklin Hughes design anything else Tiki, or anything else of note at all?